This American Life

Live in the cinema, Ira Glass presents the best of 12 years of his popular radio documentary series.

Ira Glass is Doc Lab’s special guest this year. Twelve years ago, he started a new radio documentary program on NPR entitled This American Life. Five hundred radio stations now carry the show, and it is also available as a free download.

In each of the weekly broadcasts, Glass presents three or four stories around a given subject. These themes range widely, from “impossible loves” to “swapped at birth” to “returning to the scene of a crime.” This series has become one of the most popular documentary series in the world — with audiences of 1.8 million every week — and has received many awards.

A TV version began two years ago, and a dozen feature films based on true stories from Glass and his editorial team are in production. Recently, Glass started organizing live theater performances in cinemas in which he presents ordinary people’s extraordinary stories.

At IDFA, Glass presented a once-only showcase featuring the best of 12 years of This American Life. In addition to clips from the radio program, Glass also showed the audience selections from the TV series, live performances, and radio stories with added animations.

DOCLAB

IDFA DocLab is the New Media program of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). Since 2007, the program showcases new forms of documentary storytelling and interactive media art, both online and offline. During the IDFA Festival in November, DocLab presents a competition program for Digital Documentary Storytelling, live cinema events, interactive installations, workshops and industry panels. The program is open to all media that can be used to tell a documentary story.more